himself; his real greatness as an American business man consists
in the fact that he liberally shared the profits with his
associates. Ruthless he might be in appropriating their last
ounce of energy, yet he rewarded the successful men with golden
partnerships. Nothing delighted Carnegie more than to see the man
whom he had lifted from a puddler's furnace develop into a
millionaire.

Henry Phipps, still living at the age of seventy-eight, was the
only one of Carnegie's early associates who remained with him to
the end. Like many of the others, Phipps had been Carnegie's
playmate as a boy, so far as any of them, in those early days,
had opportunity to play; like all his contemporaries also, Phipps
had been wretchedly poor, his earliest business opening having
been as messenger boy for a jeweler. Phipps had none of the dash
and sparkle of Carnegie. He was the plodder, the bookkeeper, the
economizer, the man who had an eye for microscopic details. "What
we most admired in young Phipps," a Pittsburgh banker once
remarked, "is the way in which he could keep a check in the air
for three or four days." His abilities consisted mainly in
keeping the bankers complaisant, in smoothing the ruffled
feelings of creditors, in cutting out unnecessary expenditures,
and in shaving prices.

Carnegie's other two more celebrated associates, Henry C. Frick
and Charles M. Schwab, were younger men. Frick was cold and
masterful, as hard, unyielding, and effective as the steel that
formed the staple of his existence. Schwab was enthusiastic,
warm-hearted, and happy-go-lucky; a man who ruled his employees
and obtained his results by appealing to their sympathies. The